General anesthesia is often used to put patients to sleep and block pain and memory during medical or diagnostic procedures. While extremely useful, general anesthesia is not risk free. Caregivers therefore generally seek to maintain a depth of consciousness consistent with the needs of a particular medical procedure. Caregivers will monitor various physiological parameters of the patient to predict the patient's depth of consciousness. In response to monitored parameters, the caregiver may manually adjust the anesthetic dosage level to avoid over and under dosing. However, as a patient's depth of consciousness may frequently change, caregivers often employ a host of monitoring technologies to attempt to periodically, sporadically, or continually ascertain the wellness and consciousness of a patient. For example, caregivers may desire to monitor one or more of a patient's temperature, electroencephalogram or EEG, brain oxygen saturation, stimulus response, electromyography or EMG, respiration, body oxygen saturation or other blood analytes, pulse, hydration, blood pressure, perfusion, or other parameters or combinations of parameters. For many of the foregoing, monitoring technologies are individually readily available and widely used, such as, for example, pulse oximeters, vital signs monitors, and the like.
In their depth of consciousness monitoring, caregivers may also use recording devices to acquire EEG signals. For example, caregivers place electrodes on the skin of the forehead to detect electrical activity produced by the firing of neurons within the brain. From patterns in the electrical activity, caregivers attempt to determine, among other things, the state of consciousness of the brain. Caregivers may also use a pulse oximeter or cerebral oximetry to determine the percentage of oxygenation of the hemoglobin in the patient's blood. Caregivers may also use an EMG monitor to detect the muscular action and mechanical impulses generated by the musculature around the patient's forehead, among other bodily locations. Caregivers manually monitor such physiological parameters and then manually adjust anesthetic dosage.
However, manual monitoring and dosage adjustment could lead to serious adverse results, including death, if improperly performed. In addition, typical depth of consciousness monitors do not account for variations in responses to sedation therapies that exist between patient demographics. Furthermore, typical depth of consciousness monitors do not account for differences in physiological responses that exists between particular sedation therapies and among different patient populations. Therefore, there remains a need in the art for a depth of consciousness monitor that is configured to automatically communicate with a caregiver and/or an anesthetic dosage device to provide accurate control over patient care by accounting for variations between populations and drug actions.